Harold Hill Smith, 84, Geneticist Whose Work Led to Cell Fusion

By WOLFGANG SAXON

Published: October 25, 1994

Dr. Harold Hill Smith, the geneticist whose research produced the first fusion of a cell from a human with one from a plant, died last Wednesday at a nursing home in State College, Pa. He was 84 and a resident of Shoreham, L.I.

He suffered from a heart ailment for some time and died of natural causes, his family said.

Dr. Hill was a senior geneticist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, L.I., from 1955 until his retirement in 1978. He established an international reputation with groundbreaking work on the genetic basis of tumor formation and the genetic effects of irradiation in plants.

In 1976, he led a team of researchers who brought about what had long been a matter of speculation: the ability to combine widely different genetic systems. The result was the fusion of a human cell with a cell from a tobacco plant.

Dr. Smith was born in Kearny, N.J. He graduated from Rutgers University and received master's and doctoral degrees in genetics at Harvard University. He worked as a plant geneticist for the United States Department of Agriculture for seven years before serving in the Navy in World War II.

After the war, he spent years traveling worldwide to lecture at scientific congresses and work with study groups and scientific missions as a professor of plant genetics at Cornell University.

Dr. Smith was the author or co-author of 125 publications, many of which remain in print, and an editor of Mutation Research, Journal of Heredity, and Environmental and Experimental Botany.

His wife, Mary Downing, died in 1984.

He is survived by a son, Frederick D., of Anaheim, Calif.; three daughters, Lucy Keane of Mount Sinai, L.I., Hilda Hodges of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Susan Graham of State College; seven grandchildren, three step-grandchildren and three step-great-grandchildren.